Remakes; especially Blades of Destiny

October 11th, 2013, 17:14

I'm playing Blades of Destiny HD and I've noticed that in most remakes the developers choose to just "pretty up" an old game, rather than add new content and/or get rid of what didn't work in the original. Blades of Destiny was fun back in the day but you would spend hours out in the wilderness doing absolutely nothing but traveling from one action spot past several non-action spots to get to the next play area. That just won't work in a game made today, in my opinion. What do you guys think? I'm sure Chris Firefox doesn't want to offend the purists, but how does he make money from today's more demanding audience? Do we need 23 empty towns that serve no purpose?

There is still a lot of german text in the game. The game is moderately fun, though it is very slow paced. A single combat may last 10 minutes, for instance. This is not a game for the impatient or for people with limited time to play their games. Auto combat is a patch still waiting to happen, though it is planned. There are many battles that my party could win without magic, so autocombat would be nice.

In my opinion this remake make the error to not follow more closely the original. True grid and turn based movements would allow speed through large space if you want to. With the modernized movement system this is broken and necessarily feel tedious in large area.

Exactly the reason why I won't buy BoD HD. I'm fine with the early 90's VGA graphics of the original, but the system (which isn't even true to the PnP rules in some aspects) was convoluted and not exactly deep and would seriously need an overhaul.

Sacred_Path

Originally Posted by crpgnut
I'm playing Blades of Destiny HD and I've noticed that in most remakes the developers choose to just "pretty up" an old game, rather than add new content and/or get rid of what didn't work in the original.

It's especiall aimed at those who wanted to have "that old feeling" again. It has "Old school" in big letters written al over it.

And Germans like it that way. Germans have a mentality which seems to be a bit different than the rest of the world anyway.

But in fact the company failed big time here, seemingly. They released a game that is nowhere near to the "fun" that it should have had - I'm argueing from the point of view (literally) from the presentation at the RPC. The streets were very empty. For example. That was something I didn't want, to be frank. I wanted living, breathing towns. In an ideal world, they would have build that, using a modern game engine.

-- “ Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.“ (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)

They used Unity, but I've seen much better uses of that engine. The grid is completely turn based and a microcosm of the area you're in at the time. They've got the combat feeling very much like the original. My gripe is along the lines of Alrik's. The game world is very empty feeling and there isn't much to do, yet. Chris says all the right stuff on the forums, but I kinda feel its too little, WAY too late. Time will tell.

Only checked in for an hour and release and completely lost interest.
The old game had Nice Flair and Atmosphere and outdated engine.
The new game does not have flair and atmosphere and replaced the outdated engine with a broken engine. Not sure whether I will ever like the game, even when they fixed everything.

Seems like we have a date for the final version
On amazon.de (the german shop) they added 3 new versions of this game for prepurchase.

There will be something they call a "Gold Version" of this game, that will be released on 25.11.2013 and is orderable, so the game seems to be finished untill this date.

You can find two more versions, one for the Xbox 360 and one for the PS3 there, too, both dated for the 25.2.2014 as release date.

So that means that they think the game will be "fixed" at 25.11.2013
As the console release is 25.2.2014 and patching on consoles is expensive my guess is that the game won't get many updates after that point.
So personally I'll check again at 25.2.2014

To the original topic:
I don't mind old mechanics. What I don't like most about old games is the interface and screen resolution. For example you hardly find tooltips in old games.
Gameplay wise, you can still do most of the stuff today. Not that I love everything about it, but things like missing retroactive skillgains or ways to gimp your character can still be found in current games like Oblivion or Fallout 3/NV. At least I cannot remember the last time I saw luck based skillgains as in the original BOD System.

The only thing that concerns me is the negative publicity this will create for any other similar projects. I imagine a day that all the best games from the 80's and 90's are brought up to date in a like fashion, but it will never happen if people sully the products like this.

Having played the remake a bit (now that it is in a somewhat more finished state), I really can't see the reason to play it and not the original. That is, unless you absolutely cannot stomach the dated graphics and the somewhat clunky user interface of the original. Other than those, there's very little that the remake actually improves upon the original, IMO.

And regarding graphics, I honestly think the remake looks worse than the original. In particular the remake's 3D character models and their animations are pretty terrible. I much rather look at the orginal's 2D (and 2.5D) graphics, than the crude 3D graphics of the remake. Granted, the 2D art of the remake is well done (like character portraits and item icons), but they weren't half-bad in the original either (okay, some of the portraits were bad, but hey, in a sort of charming way ).

I had high hopes for this remake, but now I'm just really annoyed and disappointed by it. Wasted money on it, likely won't waste any more time on it. For shame, Crafty (but props for your tireless patching). Epic fail.

To me, a remake should be almost like the original, as far as story and gameplay goes. It should update graphics, maybe provide voice (which I don't care about but others do), use mouse if original didn't. Add automap, popup text with spell/ability/stat descriptions. Add a quest journal. Basically things that enhance the original gameplay, not alter it in any way.

Here in German, since the failure of LMK and the "almost" closing of Attic (a rest still exists), there is a thing going around called "der DSA-Fluch", to be translated as "the TDE curse".

It basically means that TDE games are either not finished (LMK, Armalion), or draw companies into insolvency after the game is finished or still in production (Attic, Ikarion, later Ascaron, later Radon Labs), or are broken (Sacred wasn't in an good state initially after release as well, and this new "Blade Of Destiny" remake is in an terrible state, after all …).

Drakensang is so far one of the few exceptions of this curse - apart from Radon Labs later closing.
Both Drakensang games were frighteningly bug-free (compared to other games), and were a blast to play (at least to me, who has become a fan of both, as you know ).

-- “ Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.“ (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)

Black Guards, Demonicon, Memoria … Yes, even Satinav's Chains sold relatively well - compared to the fact that (older) Germans don't seem to like Steam at all (or otherwise Memoria would've had Steam as well).
Memoria got already good praise, by the way. Some players already consider it to be one of the or even the best adventure game of the recent years !

-- “ Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.“ (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)

Originally Posted by Kordanor
Didn't hear about this curse yet.
But let's hope that Black Guards will break it.

+1. I am really looking forward to that one. Why is the BoD remake coming out on consoles? I cannot imagine there would be any market for those platforms.

I also echo the concern that such a bad release will sully the chances for the rest of the trilogy being remade. I was looking forward to playing updated versions of my most favorite CRPG series: RoA.

Yes I know I can play the originals on DOS Box, but the graphics on modern monitors look positively craptacular unless you play in a small window. That is, unless things have changed as I haven't tried to run DOSBox in a couple years.

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
It's especiall aimed at those who wanted to have "that old feeling" again. It has "Old school" in big letters written al over it.

And Germans like it that way. Germans have a mentality which seems to be a bit different than the rest of the world anyway.

I'm not German, but I like the way they make and play their games. In general German games are hard to learn and in slow progress. But they gave more satisfaction to the patient players like me. I think that old school feeling comes from this. But that play style doesn't suit everyone. Especially for average American players.

This is my argument, so maybe I'm wrong with that.

-- "Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it."
Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
…In an ideal world, they would have build that, using a modern game engine.

Yeah but you know you aren't in an ideal world so it's just dreaming to hope have a sort of Skyrim through a remake of such oldie.

Skyrim modern approach involves many different constraints than a grid base movement game. It's the grid base movements that can allow moves very fast up to total non realism but great for managing a large world. It was the only way to remain enough faithful to the original game without to fall in a total redesign of the game including living towns, a much better filled world and quite more.

Frankly when I bought the game I was only expecting the old game with new graphics nothing else and on start I disliked the tedious movements with the keyboard to turn.

cprgnut, you weren't kidding when you said this game is slow-paced. Aye carumba. Combat takes forever for level 1 characters. I miss my attacks 90% of the time and the overall flow of combat is just a crawl. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

couple of things that help. At low levels don't wear armor that lowers your AT-attack number. The melee monsters miss all the time too, so keep them between you and enemy archers. Also, your ranged attacks will hit much more often than melee, so equip everyone with ranged and be sure to put points into either thrown or projectiles, even magicians.

The final piece of advice is to mothball this for a couple more months and see what the devs fix and if they add content. Meanwhile, find a copy of Kult: Heretic Kingdoms also called Heretic Kingdoms: The Inquisition and play that instead